From noted CF trainer, writer, and consultant Charlie Arehart, CFMXPLUS has been devoted to issues and ideas of value to ColdFusion and BlueDragon developers. You can find him posting new content at carehart.org/blog/

Thursday, August 15, 2002

You can indicate an alternative directory for templates to be run outside of the normal [cfusionmx_home]\wwwroot. All you need to do is edit [cfusionmx_home]\wwwroot\WEB-INF\jrun-web.xml and add a <virtual-mapping> entry (within the <jrun-web-app> entry) for each directory designation:

Sunday, August 11, 2002

People are asking for recommendations of a good CFMX book. I'd like to point out that Macromedia has written an excellent one: "Developing Macromedia ColdFusion MX Applications with ColdFusion Markup Language". It's 900 pages, and guess what? It's free! Seriously. It's just one of 10 books in the CFMX docs (including a "Migrating Macromedia ColdFusion 5 Applications", "Working with Verity Tools", "Administering Macromedia ColdFusion MX", and more).

The CFMX docs are an often overlooked gem. So many questions people ask are answered there. And everything new in CFMX is covered in the docs, as well as improved discussions about features that were available in CF5 (cfscript, query of query, verity--an entire new manual, and more).

The docs are installed free when you install CFMX. You should find them on your server at http://[yourserver]/cfdocs/dochome.htm. Note that this includes a handy search feature in the top right corner when looking at a page within one of the books, which can search across the entire docset.

I'm not knocking all the fine books that are out or coming out on CFMX. Not at all. And certainly they may do a better job in some ways than the CFMX docs on some particular topic or approach. But don't dismiss the MM docs. They're really worth their price (especially being free, indexed, available locally and remotely.)